Jester Minute

As most of you know I sit here on the bottom, or close to the bottom, of the WordPress riverbed, sucking up nutrients through my semi-permeable exoskeleton, occasionally delighting in the glimmers of refracted light that reach me from your comments.  I’m a self-indulgent sort of person and having a small audience is fun.  Recently though some behemoth has torn through my cosy abode, lifted me up and thrown me into the glorious sunlight for a brief moment, before letting me scuttle back into my lair.

I’m a bit of an obsessive person about stats and things – hey, check out the name of my blog if you don’t believe me and whilst I’m not really bothered about numbers of hits etc. I am slowly trying to colour that little map in which shows where you have ever been read – Greenland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands (amongst others) remain stubbornly immune to my not-inconsiderable charms at the time of writing, although China fell to me on Sunday.  On an average day between 30 and 40 people hit 1537, some times more, some times less, one day earlier this month an obsessive person in Turkey got very into my schtick and I was left with a career best 78 hits, in a bit of a freak result.  Basically I thought that I would never be able to top that until I wrote a post entitled ‘Porn Porn Porn’, reviewing the collected works of Big Porn Party, including their classic LPs All The Porn That Fits (1985, Porn Records) and Lick Porn Lick Porn Lick (1987, Groove exploitation Inc.).  How wrong I was.

I had noticed over the last week or so, someone out there in the electronic wilds seemed to be looking at my first ever post about Marillion daily; my older posts don’t get much attention, or certainly no regular attention.  I wondered whether someone had just bookmarked it, for some reason in order to keep an eye on the blog.  Then on Monday strange things began to happen in 1537-land.  As I was trying to marshall my thoughts on Isaac Hayes, the hit count streaked past 40 – a good day hereabouts.  Then it slammed past 55 – wow, I thought. this may even trump that legendary 78-day.

Around the 180 mark, I realised that some strange shit was going down.  All the hits were on my homepage/index, but there was also a significant number of hits on both my Marillion posts, together with their associated Lego images (one of which I’m particularly proud of).  Hmm, I mused quickly forgetting all about Isaac Hayes, maybe it’s a Marillion-related phenomenon.  Anyway long-story short, 262 hits that day smashing my previous best by 194, mostly from the UK, Belgium, France and Germany.  How odd, I thought before taking myself off to bed.

When I woke up at 6am, I had already clocked up 120 hits for that day.  That evening as my count closed in on its’ still record high of 325 hits, I noticed that the vast majority were referred by Facebook.  Now, for job reasons my wife and I don’t touch Bookface, we/I have no presence there at all, so this was all a bit odd.  Being the genius I am I quickly googled ‘Marillion Facebook’ and found that a moderator, or contributor to Marillion – The Fish Years had posted a link to me and my efforts there inviting comments.

It’s the Lego that’s done it for me and pulled them in, it usually does I find – if you Google Steve Stevens Atomic Playboys and find bits of Lego artistically draped over the cover, people do tend to have a quick look before buggering off again just as quickly.  Funnily enough while the Lego DJ figure was my initial inspiration for the blog I persisted with the Lego for reasons of silliness and because people like to have something to look at when they read.

I’m really pleased, the feedback was positive, I hope people found what I had to say vaguely amusing and I seem to have gained a couple more followers, although it’s all made a mess of my neatly arranged little weekly/monthly stats and their gradual upwards progress.  It is funny to think though that a mention on a single site dedicated to a much-loved, but not huge band can generate such a throughput*.  I can only imagine what might occur on a similar sort of post about a more now phenomenon – Adele, or One Direction Lego anyone?  the numbers would be truly humbling I expect.

Anyway, as is the way of all one-hit wonders after my brush with comparative celebrity I’m now back at my day job metaphorically waiting on tables and washing dishes in that American diner of the soul.  Wondering whether I should immediately sell-out and prioritize more Marillion Lego.  Once you’ve seen the sky above your riverbed it could get a bit addictive.  It’s been interesting.

217 Down (still).

*Mr HMO, I mentioned you and the Grendel picture disc on one of the posts and I think a lot of people clicked through there too.